2013 Honda Accord — an evolutionary design.

There’s a scene near the beginning of the movie, “Out of Sight,” where the George Clooney character, Jack Foley, walks out of the bank he has just robbed and gets into his clapped-out Honda Civic. He cranks the starter. No go. Cranks again. Engine won’t catch. He’s still cranking away when the cops come, poke their pistols through the window, and that’s it. Off to jail. Maybe, just maybe, Foley was thinking that a Honda Civic is the perfect getaway car because Honda makes some of the most innocuous-looking autos in the world. Too bad it didn’t start.

The car we tested the other day wasn’t a Civic, but in the world of average-looking-almost-plain-Jane four-door sedan it was close – a 2013 Honda Accord EX. Accord is a car name that’s been around ever since Honda began bringing them into the U.S. for the 1976 model year. It’s the car that has hewed to the evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) school of design, changing every four or five years, but not by too much. When the eighth generation Accord was introduced in the summer of 2007, it did look kind of different than its predecessor. This time, the ninth generation 2013 model looks like last year’s model, only a bit slimmer, as if it had done Weight Watchers for six months. Still looks like an Accord, though.

A triumph of anonymity

Too bad they didn’t name it the Honda Stealth. It’s the car for people who do not want to be noticed. It’s the car for people who carry a book with the dust jacket turned inward so nobody will know what they are reading. It’s the car for people who work at the National Security Agency (aka No Such Agency). Drive an Accord and it’s clear that you have secrets.

The Accord we recently tested was in that popular middle segment of the pack: a four-door EX with the four-cylinder, 185-horsepower engine and a continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT). It had cloth seats, no navigation, but plenty of the current 21st century doodads that we’ve come to expect – Bluetooth link, rearview camera, SMS text message capability and Pandora radio interface, among other things. Typical of Honda, there were no options – they do throw in a free tank of gas, thank heaven for some favors – and the car priced out at $26,195. Accords range from $21,680 for a basic LX with a six-speed manual gearshift to $33,430 for the fully loaded Touring V6 model with six-speed automatic. So our car really was a mid-range sedan that cried out not to be singular.

On the road, the Accord behaved like most midsize sedans, in the sense that it did everything asked of it, it carries a lot of stuff in the trunk (one cubic foot larger this year), the stereo system will blow you out of the car if called upon, and with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on, you might as well be sitting in a doctor’s waiting room reading a magazine (but please don’t try this while driving.) There are some wrinkles, however: much as the auto makers try to engineer CVTs to act like actual gear-changing transmissions, the CVTs still have that rubber-band feeling to them – when you mash down on the gas pedal, there’s kind of a spongy lag as the soggy mush of a transmission wakes up and says, oh, now I see what you want me to do. And when you let off the pedal, the engine is still revving away and then slowly oozes back down the rev counter. It’s kind of disconcerting.

A great new gizmo

In all these bread-and-butter cars, it’s hard to find something that stands out, but the Accord does have a glorious new gizmo that will entertain you for at least a few days, until you get used to it. It’s called “LaneWatch.” When you turn on the right-side turn signals, the center-dash screen suddenly shows what’s along the right side of the car. First time this happened, I thought the rear view camera had somehow turned itself on but was pointed to the right. But switching off the turn signal off made the image disappear. Turn it back on and there it is again. So, yes, your Luddite correspondent finally figured it out – there’s a rear-facing camera embedded in the bottom of the right-hand outside mirror. In this highly bicycle-conscious part of California, it gives you a view of that curbside bicycle bike lane and presumably keeps you from blithely wiping bike riders out of the lane as you turn right. Nifty gadget.

But gadgets are just part of the experience. The Accord serves well in this day and age of economic restraint – its EPA mileage figures are 27/36 mpg, city/highway – but it does have its competition, viz. Nissan Altima, Toyota Camry, Hyundai Sonata and Kia Optima, among others.

In that best-selling field, the Accord hides in plain sight – its virtue, for many, is its reputation rather than its flair, its triumph of form following function.